The role of the Supreme Court of India in
shaping the post-colonial nation has been central to its study in the academy.
The institution’s assertion of supremacy in a constitutional democracy, and its
tense relationship with separation of powers have been focal points of
scholarship, and rightly so. However, there have been fewer studies on its
structures of reasoning, its role as a policy maker, the impact of its
structural organization as well as the role that the individual biographies of
judges have played in the shaping of the institution as a whole. With more than
six decades of appellate and constitutional adjudication behind it, any
analysis of the Supreme Court’s functioning is bound to be challenging. However,
this is also makes the institution ripe for study using tools drawn from a
gamut of social science disciplines.

Accordingly, we propose to deepen
existing scholarship of the Supreme Court with a colloquium that will bring
together scholars of the Supreme Court to analyze its methods, reasoning and
its institutional organization. We invite papers on any of these aspects of the
Court’s body of work from different disciplinary perspectives, and not merely those
that come from a doctrinal analysis of judicial decisions. Accepted papers may
form part of an edited volume that will center on the imprint of the Indian
Supreme Court on the making of constitutional democracy in contemporary India.

The themes/ questions that the papers might
address are as follows:

1.Judges
of the Court – Biographies, Ethnographies and Subjective Biases: Aside from George H.
Gadbois’ monumental work biographing the judges of the Court, sociological work
on the Court has been limited. Further, these works do not adequately consider
the manner in which the background of the judges might affect their sympathies
and decision-making. In particular, there is a need to investigate the nature
of assumptions and biases that inform the decision-making patterns of
individual judges, and this would require a combination of theoretical,
quantitative and qualitative field research. This work requires combining
publicly available data with the imposing informal knowledge of the Court that
floats within its corridors and, there are several challenges to doing this
form of work. It is however, a promising field for sociological investigation.

2.Structural
Questions – Procedures
and the rules of the practice, including on appointment of judges and how these
shape substantive decision-making? Does the working of the Supreme Court lend
itself to certain forms of reasoning, e.g., the use of precedent and departure
from earlier decisions? What are some of the structural constraints that affect
judicial behaviour like dissent? How do structural aspects affect the nature of
cases that are often heard? Do structural factors influence the outcome of
cases, and work against the interest of certain classes of litigants? How has
the two-judge bench phenomena affected the manner in which law has evolved? Whether
the manner in which cases are allotted to benches has influenced the evolution
of law? While conclusive research on several such questions may be difficult,
it may allow for experimenting with innovative methods.

3.Judicial
Reasoning –
Is the court largely formalist? Is there a cleavage between its interpretive
techniques in constitutional cases and other cases? What might explain the
variations in interpretive techniques across types of cases? What forms of
‘normativity’ may be discerned in its decision-making processes? What are some
ethical and moral assumptions that form the basis of decisions? How does the
court construct gender, caste and religious identities and the manner in which
such constructions would influence law? Does a liberal or conservative bias ground
the reasoning of the court in certain types of cases? How has the court explored
ambiguity, which is inevitable in legal doctrine? What hermeneutic tools do
judges employ when discerning doctrine from precedent? What has been the
Court’s tryst of with the philosophical notion of legal realism?

4.Policy-making
and Doctrine –
Beyond the usual dichotomy of a law-making/interpretive function, which has
marginal use as an analytical tool, and with the assumption that the Court, as
a political institution shapes policy, several interesting questions arise. While
evolution of doctrine in itself is studied frequently by practitioners and
academics alike, it would be worth examining whether the evolution in a
particular direction can be explained by changes in the social, economic or
political context in which such cases arose. Whether the activism shown by the
Court varies depending on the subject-matter with which the case deals? Whether
the policy-making objectives of the Court affect the docket of the Court? Whether
patterns in decision-making could point to the socio-economic or political aims
of the Court? Whether the Court is capable of certain discernable, coherent
objectives, despite its regularly changing composition? Moreover, the ‘dialogic
process’ between Courts and law-making bodies has become an important
analytical framework to study the role of Courts in shaping policy – how can
this be applied to the Indian Supreme Court? How do judges view an ‘audience’
to their pronouncements and how do considerations of reputation affect the
Court? How does the court influence the popular discourse on various social,
political issues?

These themes are of course, intended to
be suggestive and we remain open to all innovative and incisive analysis of the
Supreme Court in the making of the modern Indian republic.

The colloquium will be held on 29-30 April 2017 at Jindal Global
University’s campus, Sonipat, Haryana, India.

We will be open to abstracts till February 15, 2017. Please email your
abstract as an MS-Word (.doc, .docx) file without any identifying references to
Sannoy Das [sdas@jgu.edu.in], along with a separate document that contains the
title of the proposed paper, your name and designation.

Abstracts will be selected through a
double blind peer-review process and selected authors will be notified by February 25, 2017. Draft papers will be
due on April 23, 2017.

15/12/16

14/12/16

Routledge, Taylor & Francis
is delighted to announce the launch the Indian Law Review. Edited
by a global team of exceptional
scholars, we are excited to be publishing the first volume in 2017. Authors
are now welcome to submit
manuscripts. The Indian Law Review, seeking to build upon LASSNET's successes over the last decade, is an academic - led, double- blind
peer-reviewed, generalist journal on Indian Law. It aims:

·to publish top quality scholarship on Indian law
spanning all areas of law including comparative perspectives that include
Indian Law.

·to offer a forum for the community of scholars
of Indian Law both within and outside India.

·to take a broad interdisciplinary approach to
the study of Indian Law, thereby reaching a wide readership, including legal
academics, philosophers, criminologists, anthropologists, sociologists,
historians, political scientists, legal practitioners and others.

The Indian Law Review's scope is broad, and extends to all work
relevant to Indian law (including comparative perspectives). The journal is not
limited in terms of legal themes or methodology; the only limitation is
jurisdictional, and submissions are welcome from scholars located worldwide. Indian Law Review may also publish a
small number of high quality pieces relating to the law of other South Asian
and Southeast Asian jurisdictions with historical and geographical connections
to India.

The Indian Law Review publishes three issues per year. Each issue aims
to contain three to five articles, one to three book reviews, a literature
review, and notes on recent case and statutes. Its editorial policy requires
anonymised submissions, and strictly follows double-blind peer review.

Indian Law Review is
accepting submissions

The Indian Law Review uses
Editorial Manager to manage the submission and peer review process, and is now
accepting submissions for articles, literature reviews, case notes, legislative
notes, and book reviews. To submit your manuscript please visit the Journal’s submission page. For information on preparing
your submission please visit the Instructions
for Authors page.

The only conference of its kind in South Asia, the fourth edition of the Law and Social Sciences Research Network (LASSnet) took place from 10-12 December 2016 in Delhi.
LASSnet is a virtual network anchored at the Centre for the Study of
Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University. LASSnet was established
in order to bring together scholars, lawyers and doctoral researchers
engaged in research and teaching of issues of law in different social
sciences in contemporary South Asia in 2007.
The fourth edition of the LASSnet conference was organised by the
Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jindal Global Law School of
O.P. Jindal Global University, National Law University Delhi, Azim
Premji University, Ambedkar University Delhi, the Indian Institute of
Technology Delhi, and the Dickson Pool Transnational Law Institute at
the King’s College, London. These institutions have been at
the forefront of interdisciplinary research on law and have engaged
with the role of law in the making of contemporary South Asia.
More than 500 participants from all over the world attended the
conference of over 60 sessions, and three featured panels engaged with
what it means to think with ‘evidence’ in law and outside law.
Evidence has increasingly become an important category in our
everyday lives, be it in the familial, political, or historical domain.
The contested nature of evidence in law and life found animated debate
at the conference. The theme of this conference, ‘Thinking with
Evidence: Seeking Certainty, Making Truth’ pertains to the question of
evidence and its role in legal and social research. For initiatives such
as LASSnet, the imperative of thinking with evidence – in these times
of virtual virality, forensic imaginaries and ephemeral archives –
serves as a fertile ground on which we can stage discussions of the
perils, pleasures, meanings and methods of inter-disciplinarity.
‘Thinking with Evidence’ allows engaging the possibilities of legal and
social world, and how they invite discussions on our changing world and
possible futures.
The conference was graced by many luminaries including C Raj Kumar, Ranbir Singh, Shyam Menon, Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Niraja Jayal, Julia Eckert, Ravinder Kaur, Vrinda Grover, Rebecca John, Peer Zumbassen, Shirin Rai, Lawrence Liang, Kalpana Kannabiran, Tarunabh Khaitan, Jawahar Raja, Abhinav Chandrachud, Shalini Randeria and Shireen Hassim.
LASSnet has highlighted the fact that although the domain of law has
primarily been either a site of legal practice or of scholarship by
lawyers alone, the emergence of LASSnet demonstrates how exciting and
important it is to have conversations about law and justice from a range
of disciplines. Scholarship in the field of law has grown to encompass a
wide array of disciplines, methodologies, political perspectives and
conceptual overlaps. If the initial movement was predominantly led by
sociologists and then by scholars of literary studies, it now includes
an ever expanding terrain of social science and humanities disciplines,
including anthropology, digital studies, film and history. LASSnet has
always seen law as an immensely fertile site to examine the social, the
historical and the political. Previous LASSnet conferences were held in
2009, 2010 and 2012 at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), the
Foundation for Liberal and Management Education (FLAME) in Pune and at the Department of Law, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.
The opening talk at the 2016 conference was delivered by the eminent political theorist from Yale University, with Professors Shiv Visvanathan, Ramin Jahenbegloo, and Gitanjali Surendran
on Gandhi’s ideas on non-violence. The closing contemplated the
evidence of hope by crafting a discussion between the eminent legal
scholars Indira Jaising, Babloo Loitongbam, Usha Ramanathan, Upendra Baxi, and Julia Eckert.
Three memorial panels were organised to recognise the contribution of
the work and lives of three young academics, all of whom passed away in
2015. The panel dedicated to Dwijen Rangnekar marked his pathbreaking work in the field of geographical indicators. Another panel remembered Priya Thangarajah,
a young Sri Lankan lawyer and researcher who made invaluable
contributions to deepening our understanding of law and violence in
times of conflict. And finally tribute was paid to U.S. based Pakistani
scholar late Nasser Hussain whose work on law and emergency remains one
of the most important contributions to the field in the region. The
three panels engaged with the work of these scholars as a way of
acknowledging their deep learning across histories, borders, disciplines
and friendships.
The conference witnessed discussions around six books by emerging
scholars from the LASSnet community on themes ranging from public
interest litigation in India to debates around sentencing
in criminal cases. One of the panels focused on a discussion around law
and disability following the recent release of The India Social Development Report. The Indian Law Review,
an academic journal on Indian law, was launched at the conference, also
a product of the conversations at LASSnet over a decade. A syllabus
workshop designed between King’s College London and O.P. Jindal Global
Law School was held where mid-career teachers were invited to submit a
syllabus of their own design for feedback and discussion.

01/02/16

Deadline for Submitting Panels and Individual Abstracts for LASS2016 Conference has been extended to 1 MARCH 2016.

LASSnet Conference- 10-12 December 2016

‘Thinking
with Evidence: Seeking Certainty, Making Truth’.

The indeterminacy in law could be read both as a problem of truth and also
as one that plagues disciplines. The question of evidence has been central to
the formation of disciplines and the claims that they make upon knowledge. For
initiatives such as LASSnet, the imperative of thinking with evidence — in
these times of virtual virality, forensic imaginaries and ephemeral archives —
serves as a fertile ground on which we can stage discussions of the perils,
pleasures, meanings and methods of inter-disciplinarity. While disciplines are
defined partially by the evidentiary protocols that they follow, the very
nature of inter-disciplinary enquiry calls into crisis the idea of a single
protocol. The methodological concerns with the seeking and making of certainty
and truth implicate a whole range of disciplines: anthropology, art, history,
law, religion, philosophy, politics, economics, literature, theatre, and
science, to name just a few. The stakes in thinking with evidence are very high
since doing so raises the core epistemological claims, regarding not just of
what, but also how we know. This is rendered all the more difficult because the
very grounds of evidence are themselves shifting terrain, subject not only to
developments in science and technology but also to forms of historical
consciousness and social knowledge.
Thinking with evidence in engaging the encounters and intimacies between the
imaginations of the legal and the social can provoke interdisciplinary
conversations, in the affective and corporeal works and worlds of making,
seeking and living with truth. Such an engagement offers an invitation to
re-invigorate discussions around the dialectic of the abstract and the concrete
of jurisdiction, procedure and techné.
How does evidence index intelligibility and illegibility simultaneously on
bodies and things? How are questions of inheritance and memory mediated through
a claim to the evidentiary? How may one think of ways of doing politics and
living with law? Or address questions of responsibility and conduct,
particularly as these arise in the context of experience, acting as evidence of
legitimate speech?
The English word ‘evidence’ is associated with Latin verb, vidier, to see.
The relationship between seeing, believing and knowing, when mediated by visual
technologies, transforms ways of seeking certainity and making truth. Along
with criminal law, procedural and constitutional law also offer fertile grounds
to think of evidence as an object of truth and power. In our technologized
regimes that are heavily invested in the forensic fascination with truth
detection, how do we think of the constitutional implications of scientific
evidence and the truth claims that they make?
Moreover, why is the ocular or aural privileged over the haptic or
olfactory? How do we furnish evidence of experiences of humiliation when ocular
or aural techniques of knowing and telling make suffering illegible in the
legal languages of evidence? Moving our gaze to the gamut of categories that
populate ‘evidence law’ we ask following William Twining: “how to do things
with evidence?” Is it a legal fiction that there are evidentiary rules that
determine probability, presumption, fact, proof and certainty, classifying some
artefacts as facts or truths and others as exaggerations, falsehoods or myths?
How is the process of making juridical facts, legal certainties and
presumptions embedded in continuities and changes in social relations in
history, economy, culture and politics? How does the production and circulation
of technologies of evidence in popular culture create demands for scientific
evidence in actual trials?
What kind of commodity is evidence? What kinds of technologies are deployed
to evidence the body in law? What kinds of knowledges congeal in the category
of expert evidence, from archealogy to forensics, to act upon languages of
social suffering? What is the nature of the testimony that underlies expert evidence
in law and literature? Do concepts of evidence in visual arts and performing
arts speak to juridical notions of evidence, testimony and witnessing?
How may we understand what we do with evidence when we turn to religion, or
custom; or state and non-state law? Drawing on the vast critical literature on
Hindu or Islamic law; or customary and indigenous law in colonial,
post-colonial and settler-colonial contexts, how may one think of evidence as
it mediates between law and justice in relation to the claims of truth to
power? How are notions of evidence in these traditions, or in traditions of
aurality/orality, constituted by the theories of codified visuality in common
law traditions? Further, what kinds of evidence does the discourse on
plurality, secularism and rights rely upon?
Why do certain kinds of evidence of suffering falter, while other kinds of
evidence succeed in making suffering visible? How do we think of evidence in a
broad sense—as not just documents, facts, proof, or expert knowledge but also
as "aesthetics of protests'', as truths that counter the processes by
which evidence is constructed in the context of of displacement, gender
violence, caste humiliation, mass violence, disappearances and/or state terror?
When certain facts are banished from courts of law, how do the politics and
aesthetics of protests furnish evidence of truth to power? How does the regime
of evidence produce marginalities and exclusions from collective memory and
historical record? What kind of residue resides in the legal archive that
allows us to describe how law is haunted by unwritten precedents of injustice?
In other words, how does evidence actualise the separation of law from justice?Call For Papers| Conference Sub-Themes| Instructions
for Submission
Conference Sub-Themes
Histories of Evidence/ Evidence of History
Evidence and Affect
Evidence and Absence
The Art and Architecture of Evidence
Evidence in/ as the Archive
Evidence and its Corporealities
The Work of Evidence in State-building
Memory and Museums/ Curating Evidence
The Markets of Evidence
Rival Jurisprudences of Evidence
The Evidence of the Body/Body of Evidence
Jurisdictions of Evidence
Indicators, measurements and evidence
Evidence, governance and policy-making
Scientific Evidence and the Making of Juridical Truths
Identity (Political, Social and Juridical) and Evidence
Others
In keeping with the eclectic spirit of LASSnet, we welcome submissions that
address concerns of the LASSnet broadly in connection with the theme of the
conference, including papers, panels, and presentations on the sub-themes
detailed above. To mark the completion of 10 years of LASSnet in 2017, we plan
to bring out a series of edited volumes and/or special issues in journals in
2017-2018. Book proposals or journal special-issues plans will be a priority in
this edition of LASSnet. We strongly encourage participants to think of panels
as potential volumes. The steering committee will actively organise
conversations around publication plans and any one willing to organise
pre-conference workshops is welcome to get in touch with us.Instructions for submission of papers
In keeping with the eclectic spirit of LASSnet, we welcome submissions that
address concerns of the LASSnet broadly in connection with the theme of the
conference, including papers, panels, and presentations on the sub-themes
detailed above. To mark the completion of 10 years of LASSnet in 2017, we plan
to bring out a series of edited volumes and/or special issues in journals in
2017-2018. Book proposals or journal special-issues plans will be a priority in
this edition of LASSnet. We strongly encourage participants to think of panels
as potential volumes. The steering committee will actively organise
conversations around publication plans and any one willing to organise pre-conference
workshops is welcome to get in touch with us.
We welcome proposals for panels as well as for individual paper presentations.
Panel proposals: Panel coordinators should submit a panel description of 500
words as well as a proposed list of panelists (ideally no more than four
speakers per panel, including the chair-discussant) via online submission link
below (more details below). The panel description should be accompanied by
individual paper proposals for each panelist, following the instructions below.
Coordinators may also choose to propose a chair—discussant for the panel as a
whole.
Individual papers: Paper abstracts (500 words maximum) should be submitted
via online submission link below. Please note that abstract/papers should not
be sent through email.
Online Submission Link: To submit Individual abstract you will have to :
i) Register as Author on submission website. Please refer to this document for
step by step procedure
ii) Login to submission website using credentials received during step i, and
upload an abstract in '.doc' or '.pdf' format along with additional
information. Please refer to this document for detailed guidelines
You can directly go to Abstract Submission Website if you have registered
yourself as an Author (step i. above), and read the guidelines for abstract
submission detailed in step ii above.
In case of Panel submissions:
iii) Panel coordinator must first submit the panel details through abstract
submission link (see step ii) with the difference that - instead of uploading
abstract you will upload a '.doc' or '.pdf' file containing panel description
and the list of panelists; and click on 'Panel abstract' box instead of
'Individial abstract' checkbox in the additional questions section (question
number 1) of the abstract submission link.
iv) All panel authors will also submit their paper abstracts through abstract
submission link (see step ii) with the difference that - they will click on
'Panel abstract' checkbox and provide name of the panel coordinator (question number
6) in the additional questions section of the abstract submission link.
Abstracts (Individual/Panel) should be submitted no later than 1st March
2016
We will get back to you within eight weeks of receiving the abstract or
paper proposal. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft
paper should be submitted to the conference secretariat by 30 October 2016
(using Online Paper Submission Link to be made available) and distributed to
the discussant and fellow panel members no later than 15 November 2016. In the
case of pre–formed panels, this will be the responsibility of the Panel
Coordinator.The maximum duration of individual presentations within each panel
will be 20 minutes.
Contact the LASSnet 2016 Steering Committee at lassnetconf2016 [at] gmail
[dot] com
To join LASSnet please write to lassnet [at] gmail [dot] com
Other information will be announced in due course at LASSnet blog / www.lassnet.org
and our facebook page here.

14/12/15

We
are heartbroken to share with you that Priyadarshini Thangarajah, to her
friends Priya or Thanga, passed away on 4 November 2015 in Colombo. It is hard
to think of Priya in the past tense—she was always brimming with life, laughter
and love. Each LASS conversation was all the more special, brilliant and spirited
solely because of Priya.

Priya
graduated from the National Law School University of India, Bangalore, India,
in the summer of 2010. As an aspiring young
lawyer, who took the bar examination, Priya wanted to challenge the estranged
relationship between law and justice by becoming a magistrate.In 2014-15, Priya was a fulbright scholar and completed her LLM at
Georgetown University. Priya worked with different organisations based in Sri
Lanka and India on issues of gender, sexuality, violence and human rights.
However, her passion for law and legal research was shaped through years of association
with the Law and Society Trust in Colombo; and later her work at the
Alternative Law Forum at Bangalore.

Priya
was a sensitive and brilliant researcher. We have lost a courageous lawyer,
scholar and activist, who believed in the value of cultivating principles that
straddled these different spheres. She brought a radical,
feminist politics of care to the politics of transformation she practised. Her
research ranged from sexuality, violence, state repression, torture, human
rights, and censorship. Her untimely passing is a huge
loss not only to the futures of alternate lawyering and legal research in Sri
Lanka but also South Asia.

Priya was a powerful writer. In 2010, she wrote:

I spent my initial activist days worrying that there were
not enough young people given that we lost them in the 70s, then in this war,
displacement and emigration then I suddenly found through facebook a hundred
young people who cared. We may disagree but we care and that I must say has
sustained me. And today as we light candles in street corners evading arrests
and threats and silently light the flame of dissent I am hoping we will revolt
in every street corner for we don’t have six years and I am done waiting for
the terms to stop, the war to get over.

And
more recently on the issue of marriage equality and queer struggles, she wrote

Ours should not be
a movement to make people feel comfortable and to prove that we, too, are
capable of fidelity and devotion; what we should strive for is to love and to
love whom we want, how we want to, and in as many ways as we desire.

In
2002, Priya served as a Tamil language interpreter for Women and Peace Mission
to the East of Sri Lanka; while she interned at the Law and Society Trust at
Colombo (2001-2003) researching sexual violence, human rights treaties,
custodial deaths, child rights and electoral violence among other issues.
Thereafter, Priya was also associate director and interpreter in a documentary
film project entitled ‘the art of forgetting’ where she served as Tamil and
Sinhala language interpreter during research, filming and editing of trilingual
documentary film, assisted the director/producer in all aspects of post
production.In 2003, Priya travelled to
Delhi to work as a researcher at the CSDS where she researched poverty related
migration of women; and interned at PLD helping organise a seminar on rights
based development. In 2005, Priya returned to the Law and Society Trust (LST)
where she researched the right to die.She also worked on the Official Languages Commission at the LST.In 2007, Priya was research Assistant at LST
when she researched and helped monitor the 16 cases being investigated by the
Presidential Commission of Inquiry. She also interned with the then
Commissioner, Presidential Commission of Inquiry, Colombo, by providing
research support relating to the 16 cases under consideration by the
Commission.

Priya
worked with a number of notable organisations, lawyers and academics, which
included Women’s Support Group in Colombo when she documented the struggles
lesbian and bisexual women and transgendered persons face in Sri Lanka; researched
human rights defenders for the Human Rights Alert in Manipur, worked for Meneka
Guruswamy on the arms industry in India, wrote legal briefs for human rights
cases relating to detention under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and the
extrajudicial killings of 17 humanitarian workers (Action Contra la Faim) in Sri Lanka for K.S Ratnevel, Advocate,
Colombo and worked with feminist historian Uma Chakravarti on gender, law and
legal education. Priya also provided legal advice and gender and legal training
for women in the Mannar Women’s Development Federation, Mannar in 2011-2012.

My friends, do not die the way you used to dieI beg you, do not die, wait another year for meone yearjust one more yearwe might trade ideas for walking on the streetfree of the hour and the banner …we have other tasks beside searching for graves and elegies

– Mahmoud Darwish

It is very rare in the rather serious world of intellectual property
(IP) to have a discussion on the merits and demerits of using
geographical indications (GIs) to protect locally produced goods veer
into a detailed description of the pleasures of different kinds of Feni,
the liquor produced from cashew/coconut in Goa. But that is precisely
what one expected from Dwijen Rangnekar, who was as passionate about his
Feni as he was about the appropriateness of GIs as a form of protection
for it. In the midst of a discussion on the successful registration by
the Goa government for a GI on Feni, I rather ill-informedly mentioned
that I had only tasted Feni once and it reminded me of nail polish
remover. Dwijen took serious objections to the statement and proceeded
to give me a connoisseur’s guide to the world of Feni, making me want to
rush to the closest Goan outpost to sample it for myself.
But underlying both his interest in Feni as well as GIs was a
passionate curiosity and investment in the idea of the local. The
lop-sided development of IP laws in the past two decades has meant that
expansionist IP regimes have primarily favoured large corporations over
individual creators and users and as an IP scholar interested in the
intersection between IP and development, Dwijen was acutely aware of
this. His work, however, demonstrated the rare instances when IP laws
could also be used to promote the interest of local communities. But to
be able to bridge the wide world that exists between abstract legal
principles and local realities requires more than a sharp legal and
analytical outlook, it also requires an ethnographic sensibility which
is sensitive to the dynamics of the global, national and the local and
this is precisely what Dwijen’s work brought to bear on IP scholarship
in India.
Legal scholars usually have more affinities with historians
– dwelling as they both do in archives of authority – than they do with
anthropologists. But when it comes to a domain like intellectual
property which claims to be not just a theory of property but also a
theory of culture and creativity, an IP scholar must, of necessity,
simultaneously wear the hat of a cultural anthropologist. Scholars like Rosemary Coombe at York
have ably demonstrated how a finely attuned understanding of cultural
politics leads to a sharper understanding of how IP laws work. While
India has had a rich tradition of brilliant IP scholars, what we missed
was someone who was able to move between the worlds of international
treaties, national legislations and the complex dynamics of power and
economics within local communities.
Dwijen’s sudden and all too early demise signals a major loss to the
world of IP scholarship and more generally to inter-disciplinary
scholarship in law and culture. One of the founding members along with
Pratiksha Baxi and others of the Law and Social Sciences Research Network
(which has emerged as one of the most significant forums for inter
disciplinary scholarship in law), Dwijen was more or less perfectly
poised to transition fully into a significant voice from the global
south on IP debates. His earlier work was more located in normative
principles and is in debate with his own later work which recognised the
importance of field work in IP scholarship. There was a significant
recalibration of the kinds of questions that he started asking through
IP laws.
If his early interest was in the question of the emergence of
international norms on GIs and their suitability more generally, his
work after the Feni study (to which he devoted a significant number of
years) started asking questions of the relationship between law and the
construction of geography. In an important article, “Remaking Place: The
Social Construction of a Geographical Indication for Feni,” Dwijen
argued that social movements often converged across claims to place and
in this context GIs for him were a form of a ‘juridical reification of a
place-based stabilisation of cultural norms’. But his article also
warns us against any naive or romantic idealisation of GIs as a form of
local protection and instead situates how dominant business within local
communities along with state governments can appropriate the idea of
the local. His account of the successful registration of a GI for Feni
ably demonstrates that IP laws which are shaped globally can also be the
basis of reshaping local politics.
If Dwij’s passionate curiosity was contagious then so was his
laughter, sometimes producing disastrous consequences. Pratiksha Baxi
recalls a moment from a Critical Legal Studies conference at Hyderabad
when Dwijen laughed so loudly at a joke that he fell off his chair. As
some poets have described, it was laughter that caught fire. Shamnad
Basheer describes one of the last emails that he received from Dwij even
as he was battling cancer in which Diwj asked him to ensure that he
replied to a query from one of Dwij’s doctoral students at Warwick
University, where he was an Associate Professor of Law. If our ideas and
our work are the only guarantee we have against the cruel silliness of
cancer, then let’s hope that Dwij’s scholarship, like his laughter, will
also catch fire and set ablaze a sustained interest in law and
locality.Lawrence Liang is an advocate and the co-founder of the Bangalore Alternative Law Forum
http://thewire.in/2015/11/02/a-scholar-who-made-ipr-relevant-for-local-communities-too-14608/

02/11/15

Memorial Meeting2 November at 16:00Shri Sathya Sai International Centre in New Delhi, IndiaDwijen left us on October 30, 2015. What he left behind were memories, humour and thoughts that described the person he was.
We invite you to come and share your stories about him and join us in celebrating his life.

​Sharif Rangnekar​

Dear Everyone,

It is with great sorrow that I
write to let you all know that Dr Dwijen Rangnekar our friend, colleague and
comrade—one of the 14 founder members of LASSnet who taught at the Law School
in Warwick––passed away on 30 October 2015 after a most courageous fight
against cancer in Delhi. It is really difficult to accept that Dwij has gone
for he met life with irresistible charm, infinite celebration and an irascible
humour. LASSnet owes much to Dwijen whose ideas, energy and solidarity made us
achieve so much.

Among other things, Dwij was a
leading expert in GIs. His ESRC project, a source of pride and joy to so many
of us, was titled: Localising Economic Control Through Clubs:
Examining the Intellectual Property Protection of Feni in Goa, India.
His yet to be published manuscript
on Feni is path breaking. It cuts across diverse disciplines inaugurating new
directions in interdisciplinary research; and brings life to an area of
research otherwise colonised by obscure legal language. Dwij extended
solidarity to democratic and secular movements in India even when in Warwick,
sustaining especially the friendships and politics forged in his formative
years at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. For the incredible energy, vision,
solidarity and friendship that Dwij brought to LASSnet, let us raise a toast to
Dwij wherever we are tonight.

31/10/15

Dr Dwijen Rangnekar our friend,
colleague and comrade—one of the 14 founder members of LASSnet who taught at
the Law School in Warwick––passed away on 30 October 2015 after a most
courageous fight against cancer in Delhi. It is really difficult to accept that
Dwij has gone for he met life with irresistible charm, infinite celebration and
an irascible humour. LASSnet owes much to Dwijen whose ideas, energy and
solidarity made us achieve so much.Pictures from the first LASSnet @ JNU below.

Among other things, Dwij was a
leading expert in GIs. His ESRC project, a source of pride and joy to so many
of us, was titled: Localising Economic Control Through Clubs:
Examining the Intellectual Property Protection of Feni in Goa, India.
His yet to be published manuscript
on Feni is path breaking. It cuts across diverse disciplines inaugurating new
directions in interdisciplinary research; and brings life to an area of
research otherwise colonised by obscure legal language. Dwij extended
solidarity to democratic and secular movements in India even when in Warwick,
sustaining especially the friendships and politics forged in his formative
years at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. For the incredible energy, vision,
solidarity and friendship that Dwij brought to LASSnet, let us raise a toast to
Dwij wherever we are tonight.

To his
family and friends, deep condolences.

In
sorrow, Pratiksha

-->
His family can be reached at the following addresses

-->Veena,
Dwij’s mother
-->

Email: veenarangnekar41@gmail.com

-->
Sharif,
Dwij’s brother

-->

Email: srangnekar@icloud.com

-->

For
those of you who had not met Dwij, this is how Warwick introduces his research.

Dwijen's research focuses on the
innovation process, technical change, knowledge production and appropriation
strategies; of special interest is the role of intellectual property rights. In
terms of industrial sectors, his research mainly concentrates on the seed
industry, agro-food industries, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. The issues that
are of interest include the transformation of agro-food industries and the
relationship between plant variety protection and patent law; biotechnology,
the life science industries and patent law; intellectual property rights and
plant genetic resources; the international politics of intellectual property
rights; protection of traditional knowledge, rural development and the role of
geographical indications and trademarks; and the impact of intellectual
property rights on knowledge production

LASSnet

THE IDEA OF LASSnet

The Centre for the Study of Law and Governance [Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi] initiated the establishment of the "Law and Social Sciences Research Network" in order to bring together scholars, lawyers and doctoral researchers engaged in research and teaching of issues of law in different social sciences in contemporary South Asian contexts. We believed that the critical work that has emerged from different institutional locations and theoretical frameworks, has yet to find a common forum which can act as a medium for exchange of ideas, work, materials, pedagogies and aspirations for the way law, regulation and society as objects of research as well as sites of praxis have been envisaged variously. The attempt of this network is to create a forum for academics, researchers, and lawyers to interact with each other to find productive conversations with each other as well as enhance these conversations into future directions that law and social sciences scholarship in India might mature into.

LASSnet, anchored at CSLG, seeks to organise a network conference every 2-3 years, collaborate on specific themes with institutions in South Asia, especially, take the idea of publishing a series of volumes on these themes seriously as well as initiating reading groups/work in progress meetings.

We also wish to disseminate teaching materials, design syllabi and share pedagogic experiences.

So far we have organised 3 network conferences in Delhi and Pune in India and one conference in Sri Lanka. We run a LASSnet Delhi Chapter which meets once in two months allowing researchers to present their ongoing work. We have also started a reading group, LASS Readings.

We would be delighted if you were to send us names and emails of those you think might want to join this network. We hope that people will also share their work, and ideas.

CSLG also has a library that has put together important texts on law and social science scholarship. This network could use the archives at CSLG meaningfully as well as enhance it. If you would like to be part of LASSnet, please send your contact details and short bio to lassnet@gmail.com

LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN SOUTH ASIA

Inaugural Conference

was held on

January 9-11, 2009

at

Centre for the Study of Law and Governance,

Jawaharlal Nehru University

New Delhi, India

We began by noting that law is conventionally taught and practiced, in South Asia (though not only there) by treating it as an autonomous and self-sufficient phenomenon. The doctrinal researchers regard law as autonomous and believe it is capable of giving an account of itself. The law also tends to be narrowly conceived as what judges, legislators, or the police ‘do’ – ignoring the diffuse structures of power and governance, and practices of regulation, normalisation, and biopolitics that penetrate bodies and condition behaviour.

The notion that law is autonomous (legal formalism or legal positivism) has been subjected to sustained challenge over many decades by scholars who draw on social science methodologies, as well as by the law and literature movement, and by activists who constantly challenge the positivist image of law. Broadly conceived, these scholars seek to explain law as a social, anthropological, historical, and economic artefact which should be understood and studied as such. This implies also that we trace the genealogies of categories which inform law, and the images and imaginings of law in contemporary social science theory. All this suggests that the law is not confined to state law or the appellate judiciary. Not only it remains a fact that state law remains inherently plural; it interacts with plural regimes of customariness. We wish to understand how forms of state and non-state law mutually constitute each other and how they relate to different structures of power and techniques of violence.

Methods and techniques drawn from the social sciences are central to understanding the market, legal structures, regulation and statecraft in the era of globalisation. In mapping the field of law and social sciences, we interrogate the place of law and economics in the larger context of the scripting of the transformation of legal and regulatory regimes. We recognise that while regulation has emerged as a field in conversation with the discipline of economics, there is very little work which details the intersection of regulation with law. Moreover, the conversations between regulators and lawyers do not seem to be informed by social science frameworks and methodologies. The Law and Social Sciences Network (LASS) reflects the interests of those scholars who wish to engage with interdisciplinary research on the transformation of legal and regulatory regimes from varying empirical and theoretical viewpoints.

LASS recognises that much scholarship informed by the social sciences in South Asia has been engaged with social movements and forms of activism which have challenged law’s power to deny, censor, hurt, humiliate and kill. The engagement with this politics of hurt has led to many passionate debates about the place of law in our work and in our politics. Yet in South Asia, the research, teaching and practice of law that draws on the social sciences has been relegated to the margins, and radical activist engagement with law devalued by official discourses of judicial reform. LASS invites reflexive engagements from scholars and activists about the relationship between law and social movements.

The Law and Social Sciences Network (LASS) was constituted to map the field of Law and Social Sciences in South Asia. Its objective is to bring together academics, lawyers and researchers engaged in innovative legal research in South Asia which employs social science methodologies. Building on existing conversations, LASS hopes to stimulate the development of further research into the links between knowledge production, techniques of government, and the ever transforming interdependencies of power, law, and resistance. LASS promotes an examination of how law and/or regulation is constituted as an object of study, and an interrogation of the conditions of its truth claims.

LASS may or may not necessarily inhabit the intellectual and political zones of comfort or of distress created by the habitus of postmodern jurisprudence. We invite critical engagement with the global travels of mainstream networks of Law and Economics, Law and Society or Critical Legal Studies, by providing a sustained critique of the fascination of progressive Eurocentric scholarship for South Asian law, economy and society studies.

LASS may equally turn its attention to the precious and precocious critiques of the “dark side of [European] modernity” which rarely attend to the histories of colonization and the Cold War as these have affected South Asia

We remain sensitive to the fact that the very expression ‘South Asia’ embodies forms of epistemic geopolitical imperialism. LASS remains particularly anxious concerning this essentialization of identity and by the same token resists its translation into an “area studies”. Further, it needs saying that some new geopolitics is now in the making. LASS thus calls for an appreciation of the histories of diversity and plurality, within which inescapably new traditions of law/society/humanities tradition of discourse may be further re-imagined. What purchase this may constitute for the tradition of the distinctive European post-Enlightenment critical legal studies tradition is an important thematic inviting further dialogical/discursive fellowships of juristic learning.

These methodological challenges are suggested with a view to inviting their further elaboration. Contributors should be mindful of these methodological concerns as they address issues in the following more specific settings. In particular, papers, panels, and presentations were invited on:

1. CONSTITUTIONALISM, REFORM AND RESISTANCE

· Constitutionalism, rights and regulation. Has the discourse on constitutionalism met new challenges in relation to changing statecraft, international law, or human rights in South Asia? How does regulation intersect with rights discourses? How do pictures of the written and unwritten scripts of constitutional law circulate in different sites of law and life?

· Languages of Power and of Resistance. What literary and visual representations of the law and resistance to law exist in the South Asian region? In what ways, the 'poetics' tend to subvert politics? Herein we signal the problematic of the multiplicity of the official languages and the politics of translation. How does the politics of resistance constitute the fields of law, creativity and collective action? What are the trajectories that turn the public domain inside out and force new sensibilities and new paradigms that foreground a different understanding of “justice”?

· The politics of law and judicial reform. What is the politics of law and judicial reform? How are histories of such reform to be archived and evaluated? How do different forms of representations [such as the media or those emanating from social movements] engage with projects of law reform? Do contemporary engagements with reform and resistance benefit with tracing the genealogy of categories, and discursive shifts which create new forms of subjection and subjectivities?

· Colonial and Postcolonial Imaginations of the Law: The challenges by legal historians and postcolonial theorists in thinking through law and social forms have led to a rich body of literature on law and society in South Asian contexts. We invite contributions interrogating colonial as well as neo-imperial formations of law, governance, and regulation. This panel retains an interest in the contestations on law’s past as these relate to the constitution of the nation-state, and reflections on the impact of history in the reconstitution of law as an object of study.

2. THE BODY, TECHNIQUES OF GOVERNANCE AND REGULATORY POWER

· The practices of governance in relation to environment, health and sexuality. What are the processes of govermentality which sanitise, medicalise or pathologise some forms of life? What form of regulatory power inhabits the constitution of waste and how does it participate in the formation of public aesthetics? How is the body encountered in public or administrative law? Is gender/sexual orientation/disability a site of recognition that allows us to critique the manifold elisions in the body of the law?

· Technology, Life and the Law. The relationship between science, technology, the body and resources are mediated by the state-corporation alliances in a globalised era. What are the ways in which we may interrogate the deployment of technology to control bodies and life forms, and the regulation of both life and technology through law?

· Technosciences, Environment, Risk and Regulation: How have human rights and social movement discourses pursued this relationship? What images of a ‘risk society’ remain constitutionally legitimate? Are these ideas revisited in the context of the environmental contemporary discourses, such as the global discourse on climate change?

3. PROPERTY, LABOUR, DISPLACEMENT

· Property in different domains of law and life. What are the new challenges faced today in thinking through property rights and discourses? What are some new forms of property emerging through new phases of economic reform? What futures one may envisage for agrarian reforms? What kinds if new property stand invested, particularly in relation to the changing regimes of intellectual property rights in South Asia?

· Labour rights, livelihoods and mass displacement of peoples in contemporary contexts of globalisation. What is the relationship between law and regimes of impoverishment in South Asia? In particular, how may globalization affect constitutionally mandated visions of development as most benefiting the worst-off peoples? As concerns worker’s rights, what legacies may we derive from the histories and narratives of working class movements in South Asia? How may we ‘read’ these alongside with the globalization–induced programs aimed at creation of ‘flexible labour markets’?

4. VIOLENCE AND SUFFERING

· Social suffering and political violence. This has multiple dimensions not fully exhausted by the figure of the detainee, torture and disappearance; forms of collective violence and atrocities in everyday and collective contexts; and the modalities of capital punishment and custodial violence have elicited critical research. How is the everyday conceptualised in these contexts? Beyond, and related to this, remains the question of the reproduction of foundational violence of the law. This emerges of course in the context of India-Pakistan partition; yet it also emerges equally fiercely, for example, in Afghanistan, the erstwhile Tibet, and Burma. This conference invites full attention to the postcolonial ‘nacropolitics’ (to deploy here the phrase-regime of Mbembe).

· Terror, Law and Biopolitics: What is the relation between terror, law and bio-politics? Or what would constitute the jurisprudence of emergency or exception in South Asia today? Put another way, we need to explore fully the law-society relationship between the pre and post 9/11 forms of wars of, and wars against ‘terror.’ How may have the South Asian studies tradition, at all, addressed ‘terror?’

· Movements of autonomy and secession: The South Asian experience remains marked by constitutional and ‘extra’-constitutional insurgencies. How has the construction of the political been conceptualized and narrated in law and society studies tradition in the ‘region?’ How does militarization of protest and of governance proceed to reproduce new forms of ‘bare life?’

Instructions for Submission of Papers

The Steering Group particularly welcomed the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Individual proposals were welcome, as were proposals for full panels. Papers were also considered on any related theme.

500 word abstracts weresubmitted no later than 15th June, 2008. 500 word abstracts were submitted to Pratiksha Baxi at lassnet@gmail.com; abstracts were in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract. We got back to you within 8 weeks. If an abstract was accepted for the conference, a full draft paper was submitted to the conference secretariat and distributed to the discussant and fellow panel members no later than 01 December 2008.

The maximum duration of individual presentations within each panel was 20 minutes. The abstracts are hosted at http://www.lassnet.org/